Dennis Haarsager's rolling environmental scan for electronic media. "Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us." --Jerry Garcia "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." --Bob Seger

Twitter @haarsager

Wednesday, 23 June 2010

I'm posting below an interesting guest contribution by David Julian Gray, Sr. Product Manager, IS Operations at NPR. He originally posted it to an internal NPR blog called Technically Speaking and he's given me permission (thanks) to cross-post here. David is on my staff at NPR, and I should add that this is not an official NPR communication and the usual disclaimer in "About" applies. --Dennis

________________________________________

Some folks think the end of broadcasting in nigh and "mobile broadband" is
the platform of the very-near-term future.

Maybe they're right -- when mobile broadband is sufficiently ubiquitous,
sufficiently "broad", sufficiently reliable and sufficiently free -- who wouldn't
choose the media rich interactivity of the mobile web over the more limited
choices of broadcast ... But those are a lot of "ifs" -- particularly the "free"
part, and the ubiquitous part... and the reliable part .... Seems to me it would
be a lot simpler just to create a method to associate broadcast streams with
mobile web streams. This was part of the promise of "HD Radio" (when it was
still called IBOC and our own esteemed Mike Starling had not yet shown everyone
the way of multicasting) ...

Where is this promise realized?

Tantalizingly close with the Microsoft Zune-HD with its touch screen WI-FI and HD radio
receiver... Tantalizingly close with the internet only NPR Radio by Livio ...Tantalizingly close with the iPod nano ... close ...but
no "cigar" which in this case is, not just a "smart" radio -- but a really
smart radio which seamlessly integrates broadcast streams with the richness
and interactivity of the WEB.

What could be so hard? Receiver chips are cheap and essentially all broadcast
streams already carry digitally encoded station identification information as
part of either -or both- its RADIO DATA
SYSTEM data or its HD Radio stream. All that is needed is for a device --
something similar to (but just that much smarter than) the three mentioned above
-- to add a simple program which grabs the already present station ID
information and looks up the stations web presence as listed in the Domain Name
System, then allow the user to navigate from WEB to Radio -- Radio to WEB ...
and they move from stream to stream.

Beyond enriching the user experience beyond what either medium provides alone
today (even with dual devices), such a system provides the bridging technology
which enables, and perhaps even hides, a transition from traditional
broadcasting to mobile web ... a smooth, transparent user experience should such
a transition come in 18 months, 18 years, or never ... Call this system: RADIO-DNS... that's the clear and
logical name this existing technology has ...

Saturday, 19 June 2010

"If the
first iteration of online video was about silly pet tricks on YouTube,
the next wave will be about professionally produced full-length content
such as TV shows, movies and live sports,” said Paul Verna, eMarketer
senior analyst. “This shift will be propelled by a combination of
technology integration, demographics and a growing comfort level with
the idea of watching video hosted on Websites.”

Neil Hughes at AppleInsider is reporting on a patent application by Apple for a device that would add HD Radio to future. Gigaware already makes such a device for the iPhone that's pretty cool for the current state of HD Radio (I own one), but it looks like the Apple patent would permit extending HD Radio's capabilities significantly. Joe Aimonetti at CNet has more.

I've been arguing since late 2006 (though not with a great deal of frequency or success) that the real power of HD Radio isn't its audio fidelity or even iTunes tagging or multi-channel capabilities, but rather its ability to morph into a seamless hybrid broadcast/IP radio. That has the power to disrupt. Recent developments with RadioDNS and now this one from Apple give me hope that someone smarter than I will figure this out.

Update 22 June 2010:Sean Ross makes my point in a different way in, If HD Radio WERE On the iPhone. Link: The Infinite Dial. --Dennis

Tuesday, 15 June 2010

There have been a number of national-level efforts to create a digital distribution platform for public radio and/or television since the late 1990s. I’ve led a couple of them and had peripheral or no involvement in others. They’ve all had one thing in common: they didn’t get off the ground – sometimes they didn’t even get out of the conference room. The Public Service Publisher collaboration with I led with Open Media Network at least got to several revs of beta release, but it didn’t survive the tragic death of its founder, Silicon Valley legend Mike Homer. Digital distribution has happened anyway, of course, through podcasting, mobile apps, various video and audio players, and streaming.

The multi-organization Public Media Platform effort is coming out of NPR’s Digital Media division (not in my bailiwick), and in my view has a very progressive approach to the problem. So I’m excited about this latest effort. Here are some press reports:

Paul Riismandel is reporting that FCC Commissioner Mingon Clyburn, in a speech to the NFCB over the weekend, suggested that the FCC should look at reallocating TV channels 5 and 6 (located immediately below the noncommercial FM band) to radio broadcasting. Be still, my heart!

Monday, 14 June 2010

A recent article written by Mike Starling and myself in Current was reprinted here on this blog where it has drawn to date five comments, all critical (well, at least that’s better than the spam comments I have to delete each week).

The most interesting of these mentioned FMeXtra, a subcarrier based digital radio technology offered by VuCast. I think (corrections, please), that the only receiver is offered by VuCast and only a handful of stations in the U.S. and Europe are broadcasting it. It’s had nowhere near the marketing investment of HD Radio, so unless you’re reading the broadcast engineering trade pubs, you may not be aware of it. The technology can apparently co-exist on the same transmitter with HD Radio, does have certain advantages, and is or will be used by radio reading services in Minnesota.

Saturday, 12 June 2010

About two months ago, I started using dlvr.it to cross-post shortened links from this blog to Twitter. I soon discovered that I could use it to track Twitter's impact on my blog traffic in real time. To my initial surprise (but makes more sense on reflection), some 4-5% of my "followers" click on the link within a few minutes of posting. It's pretty well peaked out within an hour or so at a median of 7 or 8% or "followers." Top performers get to around 15% of "followers," but in most cases that's because of retweeting, which you can detect because traffic builds for a longer period.

Tweets, therefore, have a very short useful lifespan. I tend to do blog posting late in the evening, but it makes sense, if you're using Twitter to build blog traffic, to save these and post during higher periods of Twitter usage. --Dennis

Friday, 11 June 2010

The public media newspaper, Current, published an article by myself and my NPR colleague, Mike Starling, on this topic in its May 17, 2010 issue. I’m quoting it verbatim below. --Dennis

Commentary by Dennis Haarsager and Mike Starling

Dennis: Digital radio broadcasting is a reality now in most American communities, though adoption is still modest. About 2.5 million receivers have been sold, but assuming multiple receivers for early adopters and counting methodologies, household penetration might be roughly 2 percent — about as many households as in a market the size of Washington.

Public radio has aggressively invested in digital radio transmission. Some stations, such as WAMU in Washington, have also made significant programming investments in new channels. But general managers and their boards are asking: Where is this all going? Should we upgrade to a higher power level? What would that mean for analog coverage? Mike Starling and I are going to try to provide some answers.

Where is HD Radio going?

HD Radio has been buried by commentators more times than Nosferatu (Mike and I have even touched a shovel once or twice), yet was very much alive at this year’s NAB Show. The pace of consumer acceptance is slow and we’re an impatient bunch. No one really knows where this is all going, but a couple of examples from broadcasting’s past will provide some context.

FM stations now get 80 percent of radio listening, but the technology didn’t always look like a winner. The first FM station went on the air in 1938 when broadcasting itself was less than two decades old, and it took roughly 40 years before FM overtook AM to become the dominant aural medium. You could start in radio, have a full career, and retire in that time. Stereo, first available in 1961, contributed to the eventual disruption of AM, but even that took more than 15 years.

The first digital television station in the U.S. went on the air in 1996, but it was a full decade later before a fourth generation of decoder chips delivered receiver performance that even approached an acceptable level. Fourteen years later, penetration of receivers with HD-capable tuners is only 17 to 40 percent, depending on the market. If you look at what was happening in the consumer video world during that lost decade and shortly before, you’ll see that American TV broadcasters were hugely disrupted by competition from cable and satellite providers, videocassettes and DVDs.

Radio broadcasting has been disrupted for decades by television, tapes, CDs and digital music players. We’ve survived, but have been changed.

The disruption continues. A large number of Internet radios have been released to the marketplace, and new services including the enormously successful streaming service, Pandora, and its competitors are bringing customizable music to multiple platforms. And what about the news/talk listener? Stitcher and RadioWeave stream podcasts that users can assemble into their own on-demand “stations.” The iPhone and other smartphones have taken locality out of portable radio, providing access to any station anywhere. In December, Pandora had 300,000 “average active sessions” online — almost as many as CBS Radio and Clear Channel combined.

This past year was a good one for digital radio in the U.S. Receiver manufacturers came out with the first digital radios that didn’t require a giant “wall wart” to power them, including Microsoft’s well-reviewed Zune upgrade. And they’ve learned more about how to build digital radios with less internal noise. More car manufacturers have signed on. And at year’s end, NPR and iBiquity Digital negotiated a compromise, which the FCC adopted, enabling a meaningful power increase (four-fold or, in some cases, up to ten-fold) for digital radio while providing important protections for analog FM reception.

These are all necessary — though not sufficient — steps for success. Radio needs to show that it’s ready to provide value to listeners in a very competitive and disruptive marketplace.

One brilliant thing about the U.S. digital radio standard is that it rather easy to develop new capabilities for it — more or less like developing new web pages. There are many exciting innovations in the works that will make today’s receivers look rather pedestrian. Visual and data elements are coming. And it would be surprising if we don’t, within very few years, see hybrid radios incorporating analog, HD Radio and IP radio in one dashboard unit.

HD Radio is neither DOA, nor is it assured of success. Rather, it has a plausible shot at market acceptance if we’re patient and learn from our disruptors. Disruptive technologies don’t need to overtake radio, they just have to skim our margin — and margins are pretty skinny where they exist at all.

Mike will explain the new digital radio power increase and what general managers and their boards should know about this important development. As with stereo, there is “no free lunch” with in-band on-channel (IBOC) digital — not even at current power levels. But we believe the FCC’s balanced approach will moderate the costs to analog reception, permitting digital radio services to grow while protecting analog services and their far greater number of listeners.

Upgrading HD v. analog coverage

Mike: It should come as no surprise that there are tradeoffs when you add power in the FM band. The power increase for IBOC FM stations resides on each station’s first-adjacent channel. Therefore, the roughly 10 to 15 percent of stations that operate with minimum spacing may suffer interference with their fringe reception (near or beyond their protected contours). So, for stations that rely on coverage beyond their protected contours, an HD power increase by a closely spaced first-adjacent neighbor could be particularly problematic.

Digital stations have been operating at a power level that is 1 percent of the analog level. The FCC now allows a blanket 6 dB (four-fold) power increase from this level, but that’s expected to cause some new instances of first-adjacent HD Radio stations interfering with neighboring analog FM stations.

The FCC, in adopting these rules, stated that it had received “no bona fide complaints of interference” after HD Radio had operated several years at the 1 percent power level. And they stressed again that interference beyond protected contours is not actionable. So if your station relies on listening beyond your protected contour, you should consult with qualified engineering personnel to determine the likelihood of new interference from stations increasing IBOC power nearby — and consider targeting important communities in such areas as priorities for translator or repeater upgrades.

Contrary to what you’d expect, we don’t expect worsened interference from stations that go for the greatest power increases — those that boost power up to ten-fold (to as much as 10 percent of analog power). Those stations will have to operate under tougher anti-interference rules.

Interference is more likely to occur with the closely spaced HD Radio signals with smaller power increases (those going to 4 percent of their analog power). Many but not all of these stations are in the congested Northeast.

Again, remember that regardless of separation criteria, detecting IBOC interference is highly dependent on modulation density masking and the most vulnerable stations are those programming talk or lightly processed music.

The bottom line is: be on the lookout for stations that are likely to upgrade power on your first-adjacent frequencies. We expect these to initially be stations that are participating in traffic services, such as Clear Channel or Broadcast Traffic Consortium outlets, or others that are investing heavily in the success of the HD offerings, whether multicast streams — or emerging datacast services. Here again, qualified engineering help can point out where these moves are likely.

There has been discussion about the need for a systematic means of tracking increases as filed with the FCC for stations that might reasonably be on a “watchlist” of most vulnerable stations. Remember that the NPR Labs testing (www.nprlabs.org) showed that the most vulnerable stations are those running news/talk or lightly processed, high-fidelity music with extended passages at low volume levels. If you operate a moderately processed jazz format, you will be less susceptible than if you are operating a news/talk or classical station. And monaural stations will be less susceptible than stereo stations.

Should we upgrade?

If you’re running a multicast format important to your station’s community mission on HD2, HD3 or HD4, you should plan an upgrade to the highest available power at your earliest opportunity. If you would like to maximize your opportunity to participate in emerging HD data services, a power upgrade should be important to you, too.

Because the rules will trigger 3-dB power step-downs when six or more bona fide complaints cannot be resolved between affected stations, it would be advantageous to have your station on the air before the launch of a potentially interfering new analog station. In addition, listeners will be more likely to complain about IBOC interference, which is indistinguishable from noise, if it begins after they develop expectations about the sound of an analog station.

At the very least, every station should ask its HD equipment manufacturer what it would cost to upgrade power to 4 percent of analog power, as well as to the maximum power allowable.

Many stations will be able to eke out a further increase in power when iBiquity releases new software to transmitter manufacturers later this year. That will enable them to increase HD Radio power asymmetrically — more on the side where there’s less potential interference. Stations will benefit by determining a.s.a.p. how much they can increase power symmetrically and asymmetrically, and what it costs, so they can take advantage of matching funds offered by CPB. There’s no guarantee that the funds will always be available or that you’ll continue to have any elbow room among nearby frequencies.

Dennis: In its 90-year existence, radio has proven amazingly adaptable to both technology and competitive challenges. However, never in that time has our industry faced so many disruptors as we have now. Even the disruptors have disruptors.

Surely, radio must adopt multiple distribution strategies for web and mobile devices, and we’ve made notable inroads in that regard. But since our “gross tonnage” of listening will come from over-the-air broadcasting for many years to come, we must look at modernizing its technology and business strategies as well.

The IBOC radio standard has the flexibility and initial take-up to be an important tool in this effort to continue and increase service to our audiences. The collaborative RadioDNS project (radiodns.org) is developing exciting new ways to combine radio broadcasting with Internet Protocol capabilities. It’s also entirely feasible now to give HD Radio a back channel for interactivity by building broadcast radio receivers that can also send and receive 3G or 4G wireless services. The more HD Radio can assume the capabilities of Internet services such as Pandora and Stitcher, the sooner our investments in digital transmission will pay off. If radio broadcasters as a group are smart, the receivers of the relatively near future will have interactivity as well as the scalability of radio broadcasting.

_________________________Dennis Haarsager is NPR’s senior v.p. for system resources and technology and former acting chief exec, and the author of the blog Technology360.com. Mike Starling is NPR v.p. and chief technology officer and executive director of NPR Labs. Web page posted May 25, 2010 Copyright 2010 by Current LLC

Yesterday, NPR announced that I’ll be retiring at the end of this year, 41 years after reporting for work at KUSD in the small university town of Vermillion, South Dakota. It’s pretty scary how fast four decades go. In 1969, vacuum tube devices were still plentiful, AM was king in radio, cable TV was mainly a central off-air antenna for remote communities, PBS and NPR weren’t created until the following year, and Al Gore hadn’t yet invented the internet.

Actually, there were already signs of change in each of those areas. For example, in that year, the first internet-like physical network was built using federal funds and 50 kbps(!) circuits between four universities in California and Utah. FM was gaining ground on AM thanks to rock’s ascendance and a then-popular but now-dead format called “beautiful music.” The nascent cable industry was fighting restrictive FCC programming policies that were finally lifted in 1972 and changed everything.

The point is that things are always changing and success goes to those who respond to this and penalizes those who are in denial. The latter number is, unfortunately, almost always a much bigger than the former.

I’ve had many of influencers over my career, but I’ll single out only two. My first post-college boss, Martin Busch, was one of public broadcasting’s pioneers who, as he once put it, “raised me from a whelp.” He was himself influenced by Jack McBride, and together they provided ubiquitous services to the rural states of South Dak0ta and Nebraska, respectively. So I’ve always viewed state and regional networks as the most efficient way to serve rural populations, and I’ve built a couple of them myself. Secondly, I’ve been strongly influenced by Clayton Christensen’s arguments about disruption. The Harvard professor wasn’t the first one to bring up this notion (that may have been the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who I read in college), but he was certainly the most articulate. Reading his Innovator’s Dilemma was the proverbial whack on the side of the head and has influenced my interest in trying to ascertain the trend vectors in our industry going forward.

I’m not ready to say with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, “So long, and thanks for all the fish.” For one thing, I have a bit over six months left here at NPR and want to keep intellectually involved after retirement, primarily through this blog. More importantly, unlike his escaping dolphins, I’m not retiring because we’re about to be demolished to make room for the media equivalent of an intergalactic expressway.

Or maybe I’m in denial. Hold it, what are those orange flags staked out in the field? ;-)

I’ll keep up this blog as long as it has readers and look forward to being able to write without fear of appearing to speak for some organization. --Dennis

Wednesday, 09 June 2010

I commute on weekends to the farm about 55 miles west of Washington, DC and have tried Pandora a few times with my iPhone plugged into my Jeep’s sound system. During rush hour, it’s hard to even complete a phone call on this route (the iPhone’s carrier is AT&T 3G), so of course streaming Pandora is spotty, too. But tonight, when I drove back from there to my condo in Falls Church, I was able to listen to my “Bonnie Raitt station” all the way from Hillsboro with no drops at all. It was flawless. The difference, of course, is that I left Hillsboro at 10:00 p.m.

It worked so well because contention for the network was low then. If there were as many 3G streams going on at that time as even a low-rated Washington radio station has listeners at that time of night, you can bet it would have brought the wireless system to its knees. We’re a long way from being able to scale listening over smart phones and dashboard IP devices. Consumers will want to do that, so it’s also a safe bet that the appetite for spectrum will continue unabated. --Dennis